


In Our Bones

by scullyseviltwin



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Fix-It, Homophobic Language, M/M, The Turtle (IT) CAN Help Us
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-17 03:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21047840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullyseviltwin/pseuds/scullyseviltwin
Summary: Richie Tozier.How in the fuck had he ever forgotten Richie Tozier.





	In Our Bones

Eddie Kaspbrak has never been a particularly sentimental person. He doesn’t like clutter and so doesn’t generally hang onto packs of pictures or gifts or trinkets. He has a single photo of his mother, gilt frame and all, atop his dresser.    
  


And, really, his mother is only there because Eddie knows she’ll somehow sense if she’s not represented somewhere in his space. 

  
  
There’s also a card that his aunt had sent him for his birthday, and a weathered photo of his father, taken before Eddie had been born .

But that’s it. 

When he’d left Derry for the University of Rhode Island, he’d made a promise to himself to leave behind as much as he could manage. Getting out of that shit town was paramount, and he hadn’t put too much thought into what he needed to take with him. Some clothes, his meds, a bunch of books — what else did he need? He's going to school out of state, but not so far away that he couldn’t come back and get something if he _ really _ wanted it.

He seriously doubts that he’ll want anything enough to go back. 

His mother had made certain that Eddie wouldn’t be too far away; four and a half hours up 95 and he could be back in Derry if he ever needed to be.

Thus far, he hasn’t needed to be, thank fucking Christ. 

  
  
Senior year means that he’s almost out of Providence, too. After graduation he’ll be headed even further south. Manhattan seems like a safe place to land —dirty and loud, yes, but with tons of job prospects, and he can’t be too picky— or Hartford, but if he can fucking avoid Connecticut, he will. 

Eddie knows his mother will have a fit, but if he keeps jumping just a few miles down the road — just another state away! New York City isn’t even that far! —he’ll eventually end up on the west coast somewhere, far away from Maine, on a different ocean. A different world, if all goes to plan. 

Right now, things are good in Providence, though. He has a small apartment on the edge of campus, a luxury gleaned from two semesters working one of the coveted, paid internships at John Hancock in Boston. It’s tiny, in an old tenement building by the river, but it’s his, and he can clean it to his exact specifications.

He’s been “moving in” for three weeks, finding time where he can between classes and his part-time gig at an accounting firm on Federal Hill, and he’s unreasonably angry with himself that he’s not gotten it finished. The boxes still hugging the corners of his space invade his mind at every available opportunity and taunt him in their unpacked state. Clutter, he hates it. It makes him  _ crazy _ . 

It’s late on a Tuesday when he resolves to get it the fuck done and attacks the boxes with a single-minded vigor. Pouring himself a finger of his good — and only — whiskey and snapping on industrial strength rubber gloves, he gets down to it. He finds a container of perfectly-folded sweaters which throws off his entire color-coded system, and after self-flagellating for a good five minutes, he pulls them out and places them, squared-off and neat, into the requisite dresser drawer. 

When he returns to the living room, he moves to break down the cardboard box and notices a smooth, blue book at the bottom. There’s a building etched in gilt on the front, and it takes Eddie longer than it probably should to realize it’s an image of his high school. And if the image hadn’t given it away, Eddie realizes, the “Class of 1994” really should have.

His yearbook, then. He honestly can’t even remember ever having gotten his yearbook; hell, it’s only been four years but he can barely remember high school at all. Eddie opens the book. The plasticy outer binder cracks from having remained untouched for so long.

For a few minutes, Eddie reads over the inscriptions his classmates had made. He doesn’t remember a single one of them, but doesn’t find that odd. He’d wanted to get the hell out of Derry; he doesn’t feel any particular sadness about leaving his memories there, too. 

He flips the pages and foreign faces smile up at him, people he’s sure he knew at some point but can’t place now and doesn’t feel too keen to try. His gaze lingers over an image of a softly-smiling girl, her red hair and blue eyes confounding him; she’s beautiful and familiar. A sensation rolls up his back and settles across his shoulders; he feels comfort, safety, amusement. It’s a weirdly familiar and welcome miasma.

  
  
“Beverly Marsh,” is the name that goes along with the face and he recalls that there had been an inscription on the very first blank page: _“You’ll always be the one I call at two in the morning. I’m gonna miss you like crazy, Kaspbrak, Love, Bev.”_ The words make him smile in a way that rings fond and nostalgic, but beyond the sudden stab in his heart, there’s nothing more he can place about this girl. 

Eddie gets all the way to the last page of the yearbook, after all of the photos of clubs and sports teams, and there’s one inscription scribbled along the edge of a page of local advertisements that catches his eye; a weird fucking place to write anything. The handwriting is scratched and manic, and just looking at it makes his brain hum. 

“ _ You’ll always know where to find me, Eds. xx R _ ”

He reads the words once, and then again. The inside of his skull suddenly feels itchy and frantic; for a moment he thinks he’s on the verge of having a panic attack. Not that he’s ever needed a reason to have a panic attack, but Eddie doesn’t understand  _ why _ this time. 

  
  
The itching sensation turns into a buzzing and the world tilts slightly on its axis. Eddie stumbles back, fumbles to the floor with his back against the wall. Something is pulling him, a taut string attached to the fore of his mind, leading him somewhere he doesn’t know how to follow.

He takes one last pass at the inscription, then closes the book and brings it to his forehead, willing himself to remember something, anything.  All he can feel is the plastic touching his skin, and the feeling dissipates almost instantly. , and so he takes the yearbook and nestles it on the bottom shelf of his bookcase between the Oxford English Dictionary and a local phone book before returning to unpacking, the sensation of having come so close to  _ something _ ebbing away. 

\---

It’s a gorgeously sunny Saturday and he’s spending it in the guest room of their condo, going through “boxes of crap” that Myra had been on him for weeks now to consolidate. The few boxes he’s kept over the years are books and comics Eddie has never been able to part with. They’re parts of him that he’s safely kept hidden away from Myra, but while looking for her grandmother’s afghan, she’d found them, and told him that he had to get rid of them because “there’s no space.”

  
  
_ Enough space for all of the As Seen on TV shit that you  _ need _ , though _ , Eddie thinks and feels worse for it. 

Maybe she’s right. Maybe he should just get rid of all of this stuff. It’s not like he ever goes looking for it. Still, there’s something about how she’s managed to make him pare down his belongings over the years, something that makes him feels like she’s trying to hit a square peg in a round hole. He’d drawn the line at Myra choosing his clothes for him, but it was a near thing; she regulates every other aspect of his life, from his meals to which under eye moisturizer he uses.

Eddie used to think it was easier to go along with it than to fight her on it, but every time she reminds him just how in control she is, he wants to rebel against it, even just a little. 

He eyes the few boxes warily, wondering briefly what could possibly be left, what memories the boxes might hold. 

Some of it really is shit—organized shit—but shit nonetheless. Old pamphlets from the URI Democrats, college textbooks, medicore-at-best sci-fi tomes that are close to falling apart, and so many notebooks filled to the brim with equations. God, why’d he held onto any of this junk? If he’d remembered that any of this mess existed, he probably would have tossed it himself, not let Myra find it, use it as another thing to hold against him.

He picks through memories, dumping some into the trash and some into another bag for recycling. He finds his MBA, which he really should frame, and sets it aside. He's about to finish off the penultimate box when he finds a tattered copy of  _ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy _ wedged against the side. It’s a well-remembered book; he’d reread the entire series after college when the movie came out. He could probably quote that shit from memory if he really wanted to.

In the living room, he hears the television turn on, a woman hawking blenders screaming that with just four installments of whatever the hell the nutrizoom can be yours! Eddie rolls his eyes and shimmies back, plops down on the tempurpedic and thumbs the book open.

The cover is weathered and dusty, the edges a darker yellow than the thin, paper pages. Eddie cracks the spine, sheafing through the chapters before the pages split easily on an obstruction between.

It flutters to the floor with a gentle rustle.

At first, Eddie assumes it’s a bookmark judging from the long, rectangular shape, but as he stoops to pick it up, he realizes that there’s a faded orange date mark on the back in tiny, dashed computer dye. 

It’s photo paper.

Eddie abandons the paperback and plucks up the photo, turning it in his hand. It’s a strip, from one of those blue-background photo booth productions that smell disgustingly of popcorn and sweat.

Something tugs at the corners of his eyes, and he hears more than sees, senses more than remembers a jumble of limbs, shrieks and giggles and filling the cubicle too full with joy. A sticky floor, a scratchy curtain. Eddie can’t hold on to the sensation and feels the frustration of it to the tips of his toes.

With an irritated sigh, he refocuses to give proper attention to the captured moments in his hand.

The first square is Eddie, maybe somewhere around sixteen years old. Next to him is another boy; they're faux-scowling at one another. In the next, the boy has his thumb and forefinger pressing against the corners of Eddie’s mouth, pulling his face into an insane smile as the other boy smiles sweetly at the camera.

The third flips Eddie’s stomach and he’s not entirely sure he understands it. Eddie is smiling softly, looking at the other boy so openly, and Eddie does a mental double take, shocked that he allowed himself to get caught in such an unguarded moment. The other boy, the absolute focus of Eddie’s attention in that moment, looks cleaved open. Throat constricting, he feels it, for a brief second, the terror and exhilaration, the absolute honesty of it. 

A prelude.

The last photograph effectively grabs Eddie around the throat and stops his breathing; he doesn’t even think about his inhaler, just sits with the unfamiliar sensation, like maybe if Eddie suffers a little he’ll finally recall whatever the hell it is he’s missing. Because in the last photo, he’s leaning into the boy, the camera catching the very second before a kiss.

Eddie holds the strip out from himself between thumb and forefinger as far away as possible, then brings it back in. He studies the four little squares and feels like he’s lost something he can’t remember and it hurts so fucking badly.

The calm — the  _ rightness _ — he reads on his own face terrifies him more than the fact that he can’t remember who this boy is, the boy who looks to be in _ pain _ as Eddie,  _ Eddie, _ leans in to kiss him. 

Eddie reaches for his inhaler instinctively —a comfort blanket, a fucking port in a storm— but finds that he’s left it in the kitchen. For a moment he worries he’s going to stop breathing altogether, just fall over and die, when he glances at the third photograph again and his chest loosens.

Because it's so clear. This person was _ everything _ to him, once. 

There’s a tapping within his mind, some niggling thing that’s trying to get him to focus, to just remember. But it’s frustrating and fleeting, and it curls like smoke, there and gone again, and Eddie just can’t grasp it. And god but he wants to, wants to remember who this unkempt, buck-toothed boy was to have made Eddie’s face look like  _ that _ . 

Yes, this person was Eddie’s whole world once, and it terrifies him that he can’t place this person at all. 

  
  
Myra can’t see this, no fucking way. She would think it was dirty and wrong, and he’d never hear the end of it. He’ll hide the photo away until he can get to a computer, maybe go on Facebook and try and track down some of the people he’d graduated with. Derry High School class of…

Class of?

  
  
He can’t remember that either, and Eddie pauses to do some mental math. It’d be awhile since he’d gotten the distinct feeling that there was something missing from his memory, but this one should be a no brainer. It had to have been ‘93, or ‘94 but he can’t place it with certainty and get frustrated for trying. He attempts to call to mind anything at all about high school and finds that he can’t, save for random impressions, the fleeting notion that he hated history class. 

  
  
This, this isn’t normal. It doesn’t escape him that this could be some sort of cognitive function impairment, but he hasn’t had any other symptoms. Other than being unable to recall the first, oh, eighteen years of his life, there’s nothing alarming, no blurred vision, no nausea or headaches. Eddie is reasonably sure he’s not dying, but still, it’s pretty fucked up. 

  
  
Forgetting small things he gets; it’s not weird to forget the name of your fifth grade teacher, but it  _ is _ weird to forget everything about fifth grade. 

He wonders if there’s anything in the last box that might help him explain the photo, that would provide answers to questions that are only able to barely form in his mind. Eddie plucks the lid off of the last box just as Myra pokes her head in the door. “Finished?”

  
Hasilty, spins around, tucking the photograph behind his back. “Just about!”

“Well, don’t be too much longer or we’ll be late for dinner with my mother,” she says, sounding bored, and leaves him to it.

He takes one last glance at the photostrip before he picks up the paperback; better to hide it in plain sight, in something he knows Myra would have absolutely no interest in reading. 

But when he slips the photostrip back into the book, the notion of investigating his past leaves his mind entirely, almost as though the urge to delve into his past had never been there. 

\---

When he gets the call from Mike — and the name, Mike, it settles in his brain as though it’s always been there — it’s only a moment before there’s a flash of something so sharp between his eyes, he thinks he might be having an aneurysm. That would figure, a delayed reaction to his wife’s call; god, she’ll never let them hear the end of it at his funeral. 

He trades his insurance information with an irate cabbie whose ride is completely totaled. It was hit fault, whatever, he’ll pay the damages; he’s got too much else on his mind right now to be pissed. And it doesn’t matter; they have great insurance and Eddie just doesn’t have the mental acumen right now to fight with the guy. 

  
  
They wait for the police and Eddie makes a matter-of-fact statement, taking the blame for the accident and receiving a ticket for running a red light as well. 

Banner fucking day. 

Luckily, his car is still functional, so he jumps back in and bangs a really illegal U-ey —what’s one more law broken?— heading back towards the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

He’s not entirely sure what force implores him to return home and immediately drag his suitcases up from the basement storage space; he hadn’t heard the name Mike Hanlon in over two decades, and honestly, Eddie didn’t owe him anything. Except the can’t ignore that there’s a thrumming inside of him, a sort of nervous energy that spikes when he thinks about forgetting about Mike, about not returning to Derry.

_ We made a pact _ , a thought so startling that Eddie actually pauses to consider where it had come from. He has no idea, but the thought is a truth he knows deep in his bones, in his marrow. He has to go back to Maine.

He doesn’t have a choice. 

Eddie Kaspbrak doesn’t necessarily feel brave —no, he has the absolute urge to hide— but he feels an urge to do what’s right, and this seems very,  _ very _ right. 

  
  
He doesn’t tell Myra about the accident (she’ll find out soon enough anyway, when she looks at the car, and plus, she controls all of the bills), or about why he really has to leave town for a few days. Truth be told, he wouldn’t know how to begin to explain it to her. She doesn’t want him to leave, period, but he puts his foot down, tells her he got a call from an old friend in Maine and it’s  _ urgent _ . 

She follows him, arguing, but with single-minded purpose, he begins pulling items of clothing from drawers. What’s it like in Derry in the summer? He can’t remember. “Why Maine?” she asks and he can’t believe that he actually has to remind her that Maine is where he’s from. 

It smarts, a lot, that she doesn’t care to remember things like this, that she doesn’t care to concern herself with what Eddie finds important. This, this is important. Where the fuck he grew up is _ important _ . 

Why can’t he just  _ tell  _ her that?

“Eddie, Eddie Bear,” she implores, scrutinizing everything he begins tucking into the suitcase. Like something out of a bit, she pulls out the clothes and Eddie snatches them back, putting them right back in. 

Hamstrung by her attempts, Eddie stops in his manic running about and places his hands atop her shoulders. “Listen, I know that this is… coming out of nowhere, and I’m sorry, but I have to go. Now will you please stop and let me just-” He gestures wildly to the suitcase. “Please.”

  
  
Right now he’s focused on getting all of his things together and heading north. If he makes it out of the city before rush hour, he might make it to Maine before midnight if he plays it fast and loose with the speed limit. Not wanting to risk getting pulled over due to his fender damage, he calls his office and has them rent him a car.

Myra barks at him from the doorway of their bedroom, but he can’t face her, not now. Eddie picks up his day-night pill pack from his bedside table, his phone charger and two paperbacks he’s been meaning to reread.

About to toss them into his duffle, the photostrip slips out again, and Eddie finds himself stunned at how quickly a memory slides back into place. He remembers, a few years back, having had the intent to look at his yearbook to find out who the picture was of, and then nothing. 

“Are you even listening to me, Eddie?” Myra demands, but he doesn’t answer, because he can’t look away from the image of him leaning in to kiss a boy he  _ knows  _ that he knows, somewhere. 

At the last moment, he tucks the photostrip into the billfold of his wallet, not sure why, but knowing beyond anything else, that it’s incredibly important, a part of his past that begs uncovering. 

The metallic sound of a zipper pulling against teeth rings loudly in the room as he sets the last of his bags down and does a quick mental check that he’s gathered everything he could possibly need. 

  
  
“Edward Kaspbrak!” Myra finally shouts, hands on her hips and it feels… wrong. It feels all wrong; her tone makes him feel small and frightened and tethered and he hates himself. How hadn’t it occurred to him until just now, how he hates how she makes him feel?

  
  
“Myra, please, just, can you trust me? One time, just trust me to know that I need to do this? Can you trust me?” Eddie is beseeching and he thinks that perhaps, just maybe, this time he’s won an argument.

Myra blinks owlishly at him and follows he and his bags into the living room. “Why can’t you tell me what and why?”

It’s frustrating, even to himself, that he can’t articulate the what and the why. In his bones, he knows he has to go back, but there’s no way for him to say that to his wife in a way that would make any sense at all. In that moment, he tries to understand her position, and takes a breath. “Because Myra, and please, please know that I don’t mean this in a, in a weird way, but… I made a promise. I have to go.”

“Honey,” she huffs, her hands on her hips. “You haven’t been gone that far from me, for who knows how long, for at least five years. Please try and see my side, Eddie Bear,” Myra says, and Eddie realizes that though he knows he has to leave, though she’s being unrelentingly smothering with him, they’re married.

And she has a right to know where he’s off oo, and that he’s being really, really unfair to her. “I’m sorry,” is all he can manage, because he is, for so much.

He feels like a grade A asshole, though he also acknowledges, somewhere within him, that he’d feel worse about this whole situation if he felt any real pull to stay at home. But they’ve been so fucked up for so long, but he’s the asshole that wants to run away.  _ Better to acknowledge that than to play the nice guy _ , he thinks, though it doesn’t make him feel any differently at all.

“You’re not driving all the way to Maine, at this time of day!” she accuses, a hail mary type of intervention as she follows him out into the kitchen.

“It’s not even rush hour, honey,” he grabs a banana and a granola bar and tosses it in his duffel. 

She flutters up to him and wraps a hand around his bicep and actually tugs. Time stops; Eddie’s never defied her like this, he realizes. He’s never worked up the courage to go against anything she’s said, and certainly nothing to this degree. Something uncoils in him; maybe it’s the need to get away that frees something inside of him. 

“You can’t go.”

He’s been in situations like this before, and knows that if he begins to spiral out as well, it’s only going to add fuel to the already very unstable fire. Normally, he’d kowtow and fold, give in to whatever Myra wanted because it’s easier. Normally, he wouldn’t think to try and manipulate her into letting him leave, because he probably would have been too chickenshit to do anything like this ever before.

But he hears Mike’s voice in his head, “ _ You gotta come back, buddy, we need you. _ ”

“Honey,” and his voice is soft and open. If he needs anything, he needs this; for the past  _ forever _ in their relationship, he’s had to convince his wife that he understands how to navigate life, all on his own. 

He knows that she only smothers him because she cares (she thinks she cares), and he really should be more patient when she gets like this. Something about it, though, the way she clings and pries and guilts him wakens something sick and oily in the pit of him. He sinks into himself, feels like an imposter of a human when she dresses him down like this. 

  
  
She’s never made him feel empowered or really, truly happy, or… right. He’s never felt exactly right, with Myra. It had been easy, and convenient, and they’d shared a life together for a decade now, but he can’t possibly regress back to a life where he didn’t  _ know  _ that she makes him feel so wrong. That revelation itches at the base of his skull and threatens his current even-keel.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember why he’s with her, why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. God, he doesn’t even have the presence of mind to begin to unravel that at the moment.

  
  
“Please,” he turns to her, nearing the end of his font of patience, and takes her hands in his. “Can you find it in yourself to just trust me, please. As your husband. Just trust that this is something that I  _ have  _ to do.”

She licks her lips and glances down at her manicure; when she glances back up, her eyes are no longer pleading, but hard. There’s no room for argument. “No.”

He feels four foot two again, terrified and cornered. God, he really fucking hates it. “One time, Myra,” he finds himself begging. “Once.”  _ He  _ trusts himself, and for some reason, he trusts Mike even more, and if she can’t trust him, well. 

With a stillness he’s never seen from her, she shakes her head once left, and once right. Foot down. 

“Myra,” he gently removes her hand from his arm and meets her gaze. His is as hard as hers is cold. The panic in his chest unfurls and rather than feeling unsteady and questioning, he makes a statement of intent. “I’m going.”

And then it’s “Eddie Bear!” and “You can’t!” and “Please!” as he tugs his luggage down the front steps. 

  
  
By five o’clock he’s taking Exit 27 A for Danbury. With every click of his right-hand blinker, he runs Mike’s words over in his mind, again and again. 

Just hearing Mike’s voice —measured but entreating— something he recalls and simultaneously can’t place, had his heart racing, frantic. A kinetic energy sparked to lift inside of him, driving him towards Derry. He recalls the place where he grew up in sepia tones, as though his hazy recollections are being weathered much like the pages of a book.

There are phantom whispers inside his head, ideas and thoughts that form for a moment and then dissipate, shiver together to form half-realities. It’s a frustrating limbo to be stuck in, but it’s also indescribably sad; he knows now, he realizes that there’s something missing.

There’s a fucking _ lot _ missing.

There is so much that should be within him that isn’t. 

Pieces of him, completely absent, and he intrinsically knows the secret to finding it is in Derry. 

Color begins to bleed into the sepia. The chair his mother preferred — right in front of the television — and the size and shape of his bicycle, the posters on his wall and the cracks in the sidewalk in front of his house. 

Snippets of names, fleeting images of people that he knows were important to him, but he’s just not sure how. Remembering them, even vaguely, has Eddie swallowing against a lump in his throat. He has to go back, for these people that he can’t remember and can’t forget.

It occurs to him when he hits the Massachusetts border that he hadn’t even bothered to pull up a map; it’s as if he knows where to go from memory. That startles a laugh out of him, he can’t really remember anything about Derry, but he somehow knows how the hell to get there. 

It’s when he hits the exit for Route 2 that his brain unexpectedly cleaves wide open, light and sound and smell pouring in, unobscured. Eddie hisses, a spark of violent illness rolling through him as the flood of recollections ticks back into his head, dominoing in, one after the other. His fingers jerk as he’s barraged by locations and names and dates and faces. He spasms when the very vivid, vibrant image of the backseat of a car flashes on the cinema of his mind and he swerves into the next lane briefly before righting the car. 

  
He inhales, steadies himself and carefully pulls into the breakdown lane and throws his car violently into park. The swishy of rushing traffic adds a soundtrack to the assault of his mind. Image after image, slide after slide falling back, slotting into place. 

His mother, the high school, the house he grew up in, his best friend climbing through his bedroom window, the library. 

But then there are other things, darker things: a condemned house, teenaged fists, endless rain, coppery blood, and a well. 

Maybe that’s just it; maybe his leaving had protected him in more ways than he’d realized. Forgetting had saved his life, once, and now, a quarter of a century later, he’s remembering. Eddie doesn’t wonder about the complexities of the human brain or whether he has some sort of  _ condition _ that means he’s losing his mind, doesn’t think about whether he’s sick and dying; Eddie goes lax and opens himself up to it all, almost greedy in the acceptance of his past.

As the light shifts from hazy afternoon sun to dusk, Eddie finds his gauzy mind drifting to thoughts of science fiction movies, early-morning bike rides, scraped palms and summer. It’s becoming more crisp, more dynamic, and he can  _ hear _ it, too. Laughter and fond arguing; he can taste the laughter, light and fizzy. The sensations fill him up, take him over and he allows them to, drinking in the sweet slide of the pleasant echoes. The darker remembrances leave his teeth on edge and his fingers clenched around the steering wheel; his heart kicks in, double time. 

But he makes himself focus, tries to recall a summer, something specific. In his mind’s eye he can make out high, craggy rock, greenish blue water. He can practically smell it —sun-bleached grass, sticky pine, wafting dust— and it triggers a memory so stark and real that his head slams back again the headrest. 

Gently lapping water, and sunscreen, July sun on his skin. He watches a boy, a friend, as he pushes another boy under the water. The boy, with his curly hair and giant glasses, looks over his shoulder at Eddie and grins, something darling and lovely and secret. He’s standing in the sunshine and Eddie’s heart feels so big and his body feels so limitless that he almost faints. 

_ Richie _ , it filters in, vague, and then bolder. It’s a certainty, something he’s so fucking sure of that he’d bet the entire goddamned house. 

_ That’s Richie _ . 

So, this is how it’s going to be, then. 

Nothing his entire life and then—suddenly, horribly and wonderfully—everything. An entire slab of his life that had been edited out, slotted right back in. A greedy need to recall what stood where the blank spaces reside wins out over his cowardice.

He has to keep going, has to keep pressing north; a phantom pressure in his body urges him forward. There’s no possibility of turning back now. It should be terrifying, this driving force, but it just solidifies that this is  _ real _ and important.

  
  
Eddie shakes his head, hoping the barrage of memory can be held at bay long enough to get to his destination in one piece. Palms slap against his cheeks, perking himself up and he glances out the window, acknowledges the sign on the side of the road with a grim tip of his chin. A welcome back.

A fuck you.

_ Derry, 25 miles.  _

\---

Richie Tozier.

How in the fuck had he ever forgotten Richie Tozier.

When he first sees his face, something so powerful floods through Eddie that he’s not sure he would have the power to speak if he tried. He remembers so much; aggravation warring with affection, fear mingling with acceptance. Looking at Richie Tozier makes Eddie feel _ everything _ , and while he can’t recall exactly why he feels everything, the slick sluice of memories that are coming back convince him that he will, eventually. 

They order dinner and all agree it’s like the old days, except for Stan’s conspicuous absence. 

He’s chatting with Beverly when it happens.   
  


He trips sideways over the realization that Richie is the boy in the photo with him; he can tell by the way his eyes crinkle, by his goofy smile. Richie is the person he’d wanted to kiss so badly that he hadn’t cared that it was captured for posterity.

This time, when a memory slides into place, Eddie barely registers the fact that he’d been missing it. The circumstances surrounding the photo: Eddie’s birthday, wanting to go see a movie and Richie convincing him to get into the photo booth beforehand. “ _ We need a record of the moment before you had your life changed by Wayne’s World.” _

And though it hadn’t been Eddie’s first choice of film that day, he couldn’t ever deny Richie anything, and Richie had really, really been into _ Saturday Night Live _ . Which is why when he found himself climbing into the photobooth without complaint; he didn’t squirm away when Richie tossed his arm around his hips and punched at his thigh, bringing them closer together. He’d let Richie feed crisp dollar bills into the slot. 

  
  
And when Richie had turned to him, all bright-eyed and wet lipped and had asked, “Ready?” Eddie had just nodded, agreeing to another question that Richie hadn’t asked. Richie had touched his  _ mouth _ and they were sitting so close and he felt like they were the only two people in the world and god how he’d wished they were. Eddie had kissed him then, and his head had spun, his hands had shaken and Eddie remembers thinking then, at that moment, that he finally knew what love was.

He remembered, too, both of them so nervous afterward, lurking around the machine until the picture had been spit out with a chemical puff of air. Richie had snatched it up and they’d both run from the theater and away from prying eyes, down the street and into an alley.

They stood together and looked at the photo and neither one of them had said anything for awhile. It wasn’t until Richie’s hand had slid cautiously, slowly, into the back pocket of Eddie’s jeans that Eddie had felt like he could breathe.

“Do you uhm,” Richie had started, so uncharacteristically serious and sheepish, “Wanna skip the movie and maybe go back to my house? My parents aren’t home.”

“Yeah,” Eddie had said, breathlessly, and Richie had taken his hand, squeezed it and led the way.

That year had been one of the best of Eddie’s life, and he’d somehow paved it over in his mind, buried it deep, willed it away somehow. Or so he thought, so they all thought until Mike helped them bring it all back. Pennywise, the Loser’s Club, their childhoods. 

They’re all thrilled to find one another again, filled to the brim with good cheer. But Mike’s jaw is set in a way that reads as anything but ease, and Ben and Bill keep allowing their softer gazes to drift to Beverly, and Richie is putting away shots like it’s his fucking job. They’re existing, he realizes; all of them, just existing. 

  
  
A rising tide of white hot anger flares in him. For the clown. For Derry. His lost adolescence. For everything that had stripped happiness from him. His life could have been different; all of their lives could have been so, so different. They could have fucking been somewhere approaching happy. 

But no, because they’d had the unfortunate luck to be born in Derry and to be the only ones in that town who weren’t chickenshit. They were the ones forced to climb down a well and battle a damn centuries-old, fear-gobbling clown. They were the ones who had to save the day. 

After that, Eddie supposes, how could life possibly make any sort of real sense? Maybe it was better that they’d all forgotten it.  _ Saved on therapy bills _ , he muses. 

  
  
Eddie’s eyes slip closed for a moment, the four individual photos in that photostrip burned on his eyelids. He’ll never be able to unsee those images as long as he fucking lives. Yeah, he’d forgotten all of the fucked up shit they’d had to endure while trying to be alive in their backwoods Maine town, but he’s stuck on the notion that he had to lose the one thing that had made him feel whole in order to get out of Derry, in order to live a semi-normal life.

_ Everything comes at a cost _ , Eddie thinks to himself.

_ Quid pro quo _ . _ It remains dormant and we have to suffer with the knowledge that It still exists _ . 

Fuck that.

But right now it’s as close to okay as it can be. Richie is here, in the flesh, and sitting so close to Eddie that Eddie could reach out and touch him. And he wants to, wants to feel the solid weight of Richie Tozier against his palm, brand himself with the heat from his body. 

  
  
Eddie can’t stop staring at him across the empty table setting as Richie pulls his Voices. He realizes that he’s never seen Richie’s standup, that he probably should. Richie is famous now, just like he wanted, on the other side of the country in sunny Los Angeles. It’s like some tragic comedy, really.

Eddie is right next to him at the table, and so he knocks his foot against Richie’s. Because he can, because he wants to, because he really can’t not. The movement startles Richie and for a moment, he thinks he’s done something wrong, but when Richie turns to look at him, his gaze is flayed so wide open, it stops Eddie’s entire being.

There’s no breath, no thought, just Richie’s liquid eyes, startled and so pleased that he almost looks scared. Like maybe this is the best thing that Eddie has ever done, like maybe Richie is remembering these things, too.

The look is shuttered a moment later, and Richie leans forward to grab his drink. He gulps it down and then turns back to the group’s larger conversation.

But Eddie knows what that looks means and, shit, he’s sure it had been reflected in his own gaze. He knows that it’s foolish to hope for anything other than what he’s already discovered, anything other than the flood of memories that have returned.

But Eddie’s always been a bit of a fool anyway, so he doesn’t hold it against himself. 

\---

It’s going on two o’clock in the morning and Eddie can’t sleep. How the hell can any of them sleep after any of that? Enough memories had come back that The Losers Club could officially reminisce about things. Snippets of jokes. That one time when Mike and Richie had egged Moose Sadler’s car. A weekend road trip to Portland. It had all flowed back so easily.

But so had the dark memories. 

And so had the fear; it had slithered in between their laughter and tried to get them, tried to get them to rise to the occasion. 

And it had worked. 

Eddie had learned fear in Derry, had learned all of the different amalgamations it. The Bowers Gang and his mother and the fucking psycho killer clown. He had learned what fear looked and smelled like, he had learned how to conquer it, how to escape it. 

Sort of.

He doesn’t know if he can stand to be here, a place so claustrophobic it had almost smothered the truth out of him. And he’s still fucking terrified of the monster that lurks in the dark, still not sure he really has what it takes to keep it at bay, despite Mike’s insistence. 

Eddie knows he’s a different person, intrinsically, than he had been that summer. Does it matter, he wonders? That he’s lived a life, for twenty-two years outside of Derry, with a very large segment of the blueprint missing? Does it matter? Now that he remembers nine, eleven, fifteen, sixteen, he wonders if he simply allowed himself to be molded by life as it came at him. 

A small voice inside of him acknowledges it as truth; he’d allowed himself to be buoyed along by all of the things he thought he was supposed to do, all the while ignoring the niggling scratch at the corner of his mind that something was profoundly wrong.

But that’s when the fear had gotten him, made him turn his attention away. The straight and narrow, the safe bet.

God, what he’d missed, because he’d been scared.

He’s feeling fear now as he thinks about Richie Tozier—the boy he forget he left and the man he met tonight. He’s not different, not really, and it had shocked Eddie how viscerally he still wanted Richie’s attention, how much he wanted to just reach over, grab him, and convince himself that he was flesh and bone.

The brief contact hadn’t been nearly enough.

Eddie is up out of bed before he can think about what he’s doing and what his motivations are. He tugs jeans on over his briefs and shoves his feet into slippers. He’s sobered up considerably, but he feels wrong-footed, like he needs an offering or an excuse if he does what he’s thinking about doing.

He snags a mid-priced bottle of bourbon from the bar and pulls two twenties from his wallet, leaving them in the empty space. He heads back upstairs, past his own room, to stand in front of the door of the room Richie’s checked into. 

It takes him a moment to work up the courage to knock. This is intimate, no doubt about it. Showing up at someone’s rented room without an invite really does imply something. It’s not that he doesn’t want to imply that something, either, it’s just that he’s never done something like this before. He surprises himself as he uncaps the bourbon and takes a quick swig, swallowing the liquid courage.

He sets his shoulders in a straight line before he knocks quietly at Richie’s door. 

There’s a grumble and a shuffle and then the door opens to reveal Richie, who looks like shit. 

  
  
“You look like shit,” Eddie says and receives a middle finger for his troubles.

For a moment, they both stand there, staring at one another. 

“Can I uh, come in?” Eddie finally asks, shyly dangling the bottle of bourbon. “I gotta…”

Richie blinks at him and Eddie lets him, lets him lick his lips and glance back inside his room. Eddie lets him take a breath and settle his gaze on Eddie’s shoes. 

“Yeah, Eds—”

“Don’t call me that,” comes out of Eddie unbidden, and that’s what does it. Something complicated passes over Richie’s face and Eddie knows he’s wearing the same expression. 

_ Rough housing, Richie’s parent’s basement, Richie smushing his face between his hands, and “Aw Eds, so cute.” _

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie repeats, a whisper, eyes going wide; their gazes meet across the scant few feet and Richie’s brows shoot towards his hairline; it’s triggered something in him. 

“Holy shit,” Richie says, swallowing thickly. “Holy shit, I…” And Richie grabs the doorjamb like he’s about to double over, presses his eyes closed and Eddie watches him  _ remember _ . “Dude, what the fuck?” Richie hisses and Eddie drops a hand onto his shoulder as he squeezes past him into the room. 

Richie slams the door and plucks the glasses off his face, rubbing at his eyes. “Oh holy shit, is this how it’s going to be the whole time? Memories coming at me like a mack truck?” Richie tosses himself onto his bed, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. “Gotta say, been back a day, and really not a fan of this shit. Derry sucks.”

“Yeah, no, this is pretty fucked up. I’ve just been… remembering? All night.” Eddie shakes his head and then remembers what he’s brought. Holding up the bottle of bourbon he says, “For some reason I thought… you? Like? Bourbon?”

Half of Richie’s mouth jumps in a tired smile. “You lift that from downstairs? My, my, Eddie Kaspbrak, showing up at my door at an indecent hour with booze. What’s a proper girl to think?”

The words land, heavy. Falling back on Richie's humor, but there’s truth there. Eddie had brought the booze in the hope that it could make things easier, their lips looser. He had figured too, that if either one of them said anything they regretted, they could blame it on the alcohol. 

Like the good, repressed New Englanders they are. 

“Oh please, like I need to get you liquored up, you hornball.” Cracking the cap on the bottle, Eddie crosses to the minibar and grabs a glass from the top, flips it over and metes out two fingers. He hands it to Richie, who swallows it and immediately holds out the empty vessel for a refill. 

Richie’s eyes lift to his, “So, what, you’re here so we can remember, together?”

Eddie pours, and then pours himself a glass before he answers. “I guess, I mean. We were best friends, Rich. We were…” Eddie sighs, he’s not drunk enough for this, not yet. “It’s all… just there. Like it had always been there and I couldn’t access it. I didn’t even know… I mean, until I saw you tonight I didn’t know that I missed you.”

  
  
Richie blinks up at him, lost, in pain. Eddie amends, “I  _ miss _ you. It really sucks that I didn’t know it until now, because holy shit it hurts.”

His face changes then, lightens and smooths. “Yeah, I?” Richie blows a harsh breath towards his bangs. “Same.”

“Wow, fuck you, thanks,” Eddie rolls his eyes at the underwhelming admission but Richie reaches out and punches him, hard, in the thigh.

“Fuck  _ you _ , dude.” He smiles. “You know what I mean. And how do I even begin to deal with this? It’s been like two decades, and here you are. Looking like. Looking like…”

Eddie’s brows arch in question. 

“Looking like the only person that ever knew me?” he tries, his voice rising and then falling. But his face looks all wrong. Richie looks confused with himself. He shrugs, closing back up. “Or. Or, I don’t know. You remember how we were.”

It stings just a bit that Richie can’t say it, that he can’t just confess that they’d been everything to one another once upon a time. They’d interwoven their lives together; they were going to get out, go anywhere other than Maine. But then Richie had decided he didn’t want to go to college right away, and they both agreed that Eddie couldn’t give up the free ride to URI.

They’d promised they’d call. 

Neither one of them ever did.

“Derry made me forget you.  _ IT _ made me forget you, and I can’t… I can’t man. I’m so angry. Because I didn’t know what I didn’t have until I came back here.”

Eddie swallows his entire glass in one gulp, breathing out against the sting. “I’m fucking pissed,” he says, a little choked up around the alcohol, but pours himself another glass just the same. 

Richie laughs and takes a swig of his bourbon. “Then, let’s  _ get _ fucking pissed,” he says in an exaggerated cockney accent and raises his glass in a toast. 

  
  
They start out slow, Eddie in the chair and Richie on the bed. They talk about how fucked up Los Angeles is, how of  _ course  _ Ben and Bev are gorgeous, how Richie’s parents became classic New Englanders and moved to Florida after Richie had graduated college. Eddie doesn’t talk about Myra, even when Richie asks, but does talk about how actually bored he is of his job, how he actually likes New York but he’s “not a fan of the Evil Empire, don’t fucking worry, Sox for life.”

Richie is the one who edges them toward softer topics with, “Did you ever feel like Providence or New York was far enough away?” He’s up and about, pouring himself another glass, much closer to topping himself all the way off than not. When Eddie reaches out his own empty glass, Richie refills it.

Their hands brush.

“Not fair,” tuts Eddie.

“Gotta take what I can get,” Richie shoots back before setting himself on the floor, legs swung up onto the bed. 

Eddie holds his glass up in front of his face, “I don’t know. New York is a different world. Maybe it made it easier to forget. I don’t know though.”

“Hm, yeah, but like, you didn’t know what you were running from. Maybe I just felt it more acutely. I forgot about a lot, but never, you know, how it felt to be who I was.”

“Whatcha mean?”

Richie’s head rolls from side to side on the carpet. “You got a leper and I got… It knew about me, man. It knew…” Eddie sighs, closes his eyes and listens. “Was taunting me about my secret. ‘ _ Don’t touch the other boys, Richie _ .’ It was so fucked up. Like the overt homophobia in this fucking town wasn’t enough. Like it wasn’t enough inside my head.”

“Inside your head?” Eddie whispers, because it sounds terrifying, and it sounds devastating, and if Richie is saying what he thinks he’s saying it’s the saddest thing he’s ever heard. “Like, you heard it in your head?”

“Eds, I knew from the time I was ten that girls didn’t do it for me. Carried that shit with me… forever. Until now.” Richie worries his jaw, and his fists clench together where they’re resting on his stomach. Eddie doesn’t push, not about this. It’s too big and too real, something so delicate and personal that he leaves Richie to his thoughts. 

They’re quiet for a moment, and they both take a sip of their drinks. 

  
  
When Richie speaks again, it’s so soft and careful that Eddie needs to strain to hear. “It’s like how your mother fucked you up over it. But you… you got angry. You at least had the gonads to try and shake off all the shit she put you through. And I… couldn’t even kill myself.”

Eddie’s inhale is sharp and instantaneous.

“Shit. You—”

“Yeaaaah,” Richie exaggerates the word and Eddie can already feel him folding in on himself, hiding. “What else is a kid to do when he hates himself and wants to bone his best friend and can’t because someone might kill him for being a homo?”

Eddie swallows thickly, “Jesus man, I didn’t know it was...”

“Well,” Richie sighs, tossing an arm over his eyes. “You kept me pretty right for awhile, Eds. For awhile there I was really living the dream. Crawling through your bedroom window like a fucking 80’s movie. Pining after your scrawny ass.”   
  


And now they’re right up on it, right at that line. And jesus fuck, he can’t bring himself to tip them over. And he can’t make a joke, not now. Not when they’re so close.

So instead, he maneuvers the conversation to himself, as he climbs from the chair to the empty bed. “I married my mother,” Eddie sighs, his vision doing a really clever, spinny sort of thing. He squints at the bottle 

“Zing! Insert some joke here about me fucking her, I’m…” Richie takes the opportunity for an out, and manages to press himself up onto his elbow and tipping the rest of his drink into his mouth. “Officially very drunk.”

“Mmmm, me too,” Eddie drawls. He’s definitely drunk but not loaded, and he feels warm in all the right places. It takes him back to senior year of high school, stealing Wentworth Tozier’s shittiest scotch —” _ He’ll never miss it. He only has this for when his friends come over and they never come over!” _ —and getting too hot and heavy in the backseat of Richie’s car.

Eddie doesn’t have the courage yet to revisit that out loud.

“But, what? Sorry? Married your mother?” Richie asks, rearranging himself more comfortably on the floor. His long-ass legs are resting on the bed and his ass is flush with the side of the bed, and Eddie doesn’t have the heart to launch into a tirade about how fucking gross that floor must be.

Richie looks up at him expectantly and Eddie frowns. How does he put word to thought properly?  _ That’s the fear _ , he reminds himself, and pushes past it. If there’s ever a time to be honest, it’s right fucking now. As honest as he can manage. 

“I just. You ever think, that. I don’t know, it’s like she conditioned me. My entire life, tried to make me afraid, tried to make me think I was sick.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe she really did. Think I was sick, I mean. I don’t know. Maybe I was. Maybe I am—”

Richie’s head snaps around so that they’re starting at one another. “Don’t you  _ ever _ fucking even suggest that you’re sick. There was nothing wrong with you, there _ is _ nothing wrong with you. You’re perfect. Your mother can get fucked.”

A laugh startles out of him; he feels thrilled by Richie’s ire, enamored with the heat in his voice. “Mmm, she’s very dead, so, no worries about that.”

“Good,” Richie says vehemently, settling so his gaze is focused on the ceiling. “Fuck her.”

“She hated you,” Eddie says wistfully and reaches for the dangerously empty bottle. He doesn’t bother with a glass this time, just struggles up to sitting long enough to take a quick pull. “Because you were a bad influence.”

That strikes something in Richie and he’s off, maniacally giggling as he flops around on the floor like a fish. “Fuck dude, yeah I was. Corrupted your innocent ass.”

“Other things with my ass, too.” Eddie means it as a joke, but dear god once the words are out of his mouth he wants to snatch them right back. He’s transported back to Richie’s bedroom. Eddie had gone to sleep over and they’d been snowed in and one thing had led to another and he found himself crying, shaking apart in his friend’s arms, his mouth pressed so hard against Richie’s he thought he’d draw blood.

Afterward, when the afterglow was beginning to fade, he marveled aloud at the fact that he’d just had sex for the first time with his best friend. 

  
  
_ “C’mon man, that wasn’t just sex, _ ” Richie had panted out before gathering Eddie against his sweaty chest.   
  


  
“It wasn’t just,” Richie says wistfully, so, so quiet, but doesn’t finish his thought. 

  
  
Eddie blinks, and can’t hold it in any longer. “No,” he whispers. “It wasn’t.”

A cloak of silence falls over the room, and Eddie closes his eyes, does his best to recall every little bit about that first night. The wildy howling wind, the electricity going out, Maggie bringing them a handful of candles and extra blankets in case it got too cold. And under the heap of quilts, Richie’s hand had dared to press against Eddie’s chest and Eddie had accepted the kisses that Richie had given and he hadn’t been afraid, not for one minute, of Richie finally understanding what Eddie felt for him.  
  
  


But they're too tender and too painful, those thoughts. And he’s too susceptible to falling into those memories and never returning. God, how he wishes he could.

There are other things to reminisce about, though. Events that they can rehash that will steer them around the heaviness, the meaning of their mutual past. 

“Remember when you busted me out of detention in eleventh grade?” Eddie asks suddenly, and now that he remembers it all, he wants to put voice to all of it for fear it will disappear again.

“I do,” Richie says softly, smiling. “And if  _ I remember correctly _ , I was the reason you were in detention in the first place. Punched Jagermeyer in the face after he called me a faggot.”

And it’s just like Richie to try and take the blame for that. “Would have sat in detention the entire year, Rich. That guy was… he was a fucking asshole. I don’t… I hate that word.”

Eddie glances over at Richie and their gazes lock. “I appreciated you sticking up for me.”

“I remember,” Eddie says, a whisper of a thing. Because after Richie had broken him out of detention they’d gone for a drive out of Derry to the coast. They’d parked along an abandoned beach and Richie had kissed him like he was dying, kissed him like he wanted to leave a mark. 

Richie had held their foreheads together and told Eddie that he never ever wanted to be without him. Eddie had cried. 

There’s no getting around these tender thoughts, of the very real love they shared, even as fucking teenagers. There’s no avoiding it, no hiding. It doesn’t matter if Eddie puts voice to it or not, it’s there. Everpresent.

  
  
He’s stuck in his head, so he doesn’t realize until it’s happening that Richie is rounding the bed and jumping onto it, his ass bouncing atop the mattress before he settles down on the pillow beside him. “We got up to some really dumb shit.”

Eddie’s smile curls slowly onto his face. He digs for something, anything. “That Halloween at Mike’s place?”

“That was a great haunted house!”

“Only, like, twenty people came!”

  
  
“It was still awesome. Like, imagine going to a haunted house like that as an adult. It’s exactly what you’d want.”

“Too many cobwebs, I blew all of my allowance on those fucking cobwebs!” Eddie laughs, elbowing Richie in the side.

“Worth it to see you trying to get them to hang properly, getting all tangled and freaking out.”

Richie’s hand gesticulates for a moment, mimicking Eddie’s run in with the spiderwebs, before coming to rest on Eddie’s stomach. He settles it, palm down over his belly button and Eddie freezes. His hand is heavy, and warm and real and it reminds him of the Nor’Easter that changed his life. 

  
  
How it all started.

  
  
Eddie remains perfectly, stock still. If he moves, Richie might take his hand away, and that’s the last thing he wants. Because he can’t be brave like he needs to be, not right now.

  
  
There’s a warmth that radiates out, across his entire body, from where they’re connected.

“You, uh,” Richie drums the pads of his fingers against Eddie’s abs, and Eddie feels it reverberate deep within him. “You work out, Eds?”

He’s caught off guard by the abrupt subject change as well as Richie’s touch and so he launches into a stuttery explanation. This is so close; _ they’re so close _ . “Yeah, you know I had really bad anxiety, and my therapist said that meditation would help and that sort of led me to yoga, which is actually really difficult? But it’s hot yoga, so it’s pretty disgusting and I can’t get it out of my head after, you know, all the sweat and god, the germs —the mats?— and so I swim, because the chlorine kills the bacteria and—”

He cuts himself off abruptly when Riche’s hand moves up his body to rest over his right pec. It lingers there for a moment before moving to Eddie’s shoulder, and Richie’s fingers test the meatiness there. Then it’s onto his biceps.

“It shows,” Richie says. 

“Rich,” Eddie begins shakily, his mouth parched.

“It’s just… surprising,” Richie whispers and Eddie can feel his breath on his face.

Eddie swallows, thickly. God, he’s lit up in all the right ways. His voice is shaky when he jokes, “Yeah. Can’t hold a candle to Ben, though.”

“Fuck Ben, man,” says Richie, a little bit awed, and Eddie immediately says, “No thanks.”

Richie’s grin is so slow, it’s almost liquid. It lights up his face, makes him look mischievous. “No, I mean, you got hot, too. Not that you weren’t, but damn, man, you can probably, like, bench things and shit like that.” Richie’s hand remains curled around his bicep.

“Could fuck you up, for sure.”

“Don’t doubt it.”

They settle like that, side-by-side, touching, but not touching nearly enough. Eddie takes another drink and hands Richie the bottle and he ends up spilling all over his sweatshirt.

He struggles to standing and takes it off. There’s a plain white t-shirt underneath, but it’s too much for Eddie. Too much skin. He’s almost grateful when Richie crawls back down onto the floor. 

His eyes fall closed immediately and Eddie takes that opportunity to really look at Richie. He’s still a mess, but he’s grown into his limbs. There’s something so charming about his glasses, the thick, black frames making his eyes seem impossibly larger. Richie’s eyes, jesus, he’s pissed all over again that he’d forgotten for so long what they looked like.

Richie’s not as fit as he is, but god, he’s gorgeous. Tall. Strong. Flippant, silly, flawed, a little messy. And Eddie wants. Eddie wants desperately. How can Richie possibly still be the same person he’d forgotten about for twenty-seven years? It feels like a joke, like a miracle or some other fucked-up kismet sort of thing.

He touches the ring on his left hand and hates himself in that moment. Maybe if he’d tried harder, maybe if he’d stayed in Maine…

He slides the ring off of his finger and holds it up, inspects it shrewdly, before plunking it audibly down on the bedside table. It speaks volumes that he feels nothing, no regret, no anger, no sorrow. He wonders if other people have made a decision this life-changing with such incredible ease before.

There’s no thinking beyond this moment, this now, when he feels so right, like he’s so close to retrieving something he’s been missing desperately forever. He’s drunk, but he’s not; he’s never known anything so intrinsically in his life, but taking off that ring has released something in him. 

His  _ mother _ , oh god.  _ Myra _ . All of the badgering, all of the purposeful overbearing, he sees his mother and his wife layered over one another, fitting perfectly. His eyes squeeze shut and he tries to take it all in stride, realizing that he’d married his mother, realizing that if he hadn’t come back here, he wouldn’t have realized it. 

“Oh, goddamn it, Derry,” Eddie groans and Richie blinks up at him.

“Y’okay?”

His head flaps against the pillow, a manic bit of nodding. “Yep, yep, yep, just really fucking great. Really fucking great repressing all of this shit and having it just… come back, no warning. Really fun.”

Richie laughs weakly, “I mean, you wanna talk repression…” It’s self-deprecating and it slices Eddie right down the middle. He’s no longer thinking about his mother or his wife, but his very best, oldest, dearest friend, his first love, and how he’s so clearly in pain. 

Eddie makes to speak and stutters to a stop. When he starts again, he says, “You said you didn’t know what you didn’t have until you came back here.” God, he’s swimmy and he’s warm and he wants so badly to drape himself over Richie and drive whatever’s making him look like that —l ike he’s  _ dying _ — away. Instead, he remains on the bed, legs and arms splayed out, his attention on the floor.

Richie’s eyes peel open and he stares, steadfast, at the ceiling. “I’m supposed to go back to living life. Knowing all of this, this  _ shit _ again. Knowing that you exist out there in the world. That Eddie Kaspbrak,  _ my _ Eddie, is still…" Richie plucks at where Eddie’s left hand is dangling off of the bed and squeezes out a sad smile when he notices the ring is gone. It doesn’t _ change _ anything. “And you’re married. And. This is probably the shittiest I’ve ever felt in my entire life.”

Eddie rubs his hand over his eyes and tries very, very hard not to lose it. 

“I’m glad I remember,” Richie murmurs, after a moment. “But I wish I didn’t remember. Fuck.”

Eddie closes his eyes, considers. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting here tonight, but his chest is full to bursting with all that Richie has said and all that Eddie wants to say. It’s then that he grabs his wallet from the loose pocket of his jeans, jostling around on the bed so that he can open the billfold. 

It rings a little “salt in the wound,” but Eddie needs him to know, needs Richie to understand that he felt and that he feels, the exact goddamned same.

He produces the photostrip gingerly, takes a moment to peruse each individual picture and committing it, indelibly to memory, before getting Richie’s attention. “I, uh, was cleaning out some boxes and found…”

He hands it down and Richie plucks it out of his hand.

“Oh. Fuck,” are the hushed words, punched out of him. 

“Yeah,” Eddie says sadly, allowing his eyes to fall closed for a moment. “I, uh, couldn’t completely place you, obviously, really, until today and...”

Richie remains silent, his eyes slowly sliding from one image to the next, and back. They’re quiet for a long, long time. Eddie closes his eyes on the warring sensations in his body; he stills his breath, hand on his belly, hand on his chest, holding himself together. After a while, he speaks, the bourbon making his tongue a bit thick, but he manages, nonetheless. “If I’d remembered you were, that you existed, I wouldn’t have... shit, I never would have... Rich. You know that, right? That I wouldn’t have just… left you.”

Richie sucks in a breath, but otherwise remains silent.

When Eddie realizes what he needs to say, he feels like he’s dying.. “That day, with the pact. Your blood on my cast and I… I didn’t want to get it taken off, even when I was better. Your blood, I was carrying it with me and it was.” Eddie tries desperately not to lose his shit, but his voice wavers and his breath is coming faster and faster. “I felt like it meant you loved me.”

“Jesus, Eds…” Richie says, broken longing laced in his voice, head lolling to the side on the carpet. Eddie can’t help but look now, down at the face of the one person in the world with whom he’d ever felt whole. It’s so genuinely fucked up. He feels like he’s floating above his body. “I can’t fucking believe we lost this.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what to do, except allow for the tidal wave of regret to crest and take him. It’s not their fault, but he can’t help but shoulder the blame in some way.

He’d been the one to leave Derry first. 

  
  
God, they’d had everything once; they’d had their entire lives mapped out, trajectories mirroring one another.  _ He remembers _ . 

  
  
Eddie can just make out the tears that have tripped over Richie’s cheekbones to roll softly into his hair.

And then Eddie is crying too, softly, eyes refocused on the ceiling. “FuckIng clown,” he says.

Richie heaves a sob of a laugh, and agrees. “Fucking clown.”

\---

It almost feels like waking up, except Eddie is reasonably certain — judging from the searing pain fading rapidly to nothingness — he’s absolutely dying.

There are no lights and no choirs, no pearly gates or any of that bullshit. Frankly, he’s relieved there aren’t any angels, but that’s as far as he gets in reviewing what he’s rapidly understanding is the afterlife before he begins to properly unravel.

On the bright side, he can’t hyperventilate because he’s not breathing. He’s not moving at all, but is in a floating sort of space; buoyant but also heavy, his body feeling like it’s being lifted and tugged downward towards the abyss simultaneously.

It’s not fun.

Eddie can’t move and can’t speak, his eyes are open but he sees nothing at all. There are no sounds, no light, no scent. He’s  _ nowhere _ . 

Instead of scaring him, he’s just... incredibly sad.

He has a vague, amorphous sense of vindication that’s sizzling out of his veins, leaving him with a void

  
He sees it, but doesn’t, because there is no light, and there is no life.  
  
  
There is no time, and so Eddie doesn’t know how long he remains suspended in the ether of a void he can’t understand. He’s beginning to wonder if this is where he has to remain until the end of time; if that’s the case, he’s going to be really, really fucking upset.   
  


  
He wonders what the hell he did to end up  _ here _ .    
  
  


Eddie wracks his brain for memory and remembers everything that ever happened in the history of the world, but he can’t understand any of it, not really. Vaguely, he wonders where anyone got a sense of heaven as an afterlife, because this doesn’t even come fucking close. He wishes he could go back in time, tell everyone they’d gotten it wrong, that Death isn’t a release, or relief. It’s a shitload of nothing.

A distant humming kicks up, not in his ears, but in what he can only assume is his mind. He’s not hearing it but he knows it exists, and Eddie hopes that maybe this means a transition is coming. Maybe he doesn’t have to remain here for-fucking-ever.  
  
  
  
Maybe he senses it, but he finds he doesn’t really care how he knows that he’s entirely still and somehow moving at the speed of light on the slippery back of a turtle.

\---

  
It happens faster than an instant.  
  
  


He remembers now, remembers it all, every last sliver of living he did. He remembers Derry, remembers getting punched in the face by Henry Bowers just for existing. He remembers his mother, the gazebos, the time he cheated on a French test in tenth grade, the time he went to Funtown Splashtown with the Losers senior year of high school even though waterparks are fucking gross.

These memories are burned into him, indelible now. 

He remembers being the most brave he’s ever been, and kissing Richie Tozier in a photobooth at the movies. 

He remembers a turtle, and pain, and the brightest light he’s ever seen.

The clown is dead.

And he’s quid pro quo. 

He will never, ever forget again. 

Eddie Kaspbrak is forty years old, bloody but not bleeding, and clawing through the destroyed sewer shafts of Derry. As if his life could get any fucking weirder. 

He only freaks out twice, which is good, because he needs water so, so badly. Crying would really put him in a rough place. His chest is on fire and he’s so damned tired, and he realizes that if he’s trapped down here it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he might run out of air. 

He  _ tries _ not to hyperventilate over that, either.

As he crawls through the muck, tearing up his hands on rubble and steel, he doesn’t think about how gross it is because he’s too damned occupied with wondering where the hell the others are. Where the fuck is Richie? What the hell had happened?

He’s underground for ages, hitting dead ends and struggling through cracks in the rubble. Only once does he have the thought that this is the place he will die, and how depressing that would be.    


  
  
But something shivery runs through him, some innate knowledge that he feels he’s just been made aware of. Eddie realizes dimly that he already _ died and came back _ . It’s not as startling as it should be; he’s had the better part of a day to rationalize even stranger things, so it doesn’t seem so insane that he’d be reborn. Hey, if Jesus could manage it, well, who’s he to look a gift horse in the mouth?

_ Gift turtle _ , he thinks and almost laughs, manic.  _ Dear god, this is so fucked up _ . 

If this is his one shot at this shit, he’s getting the hell out of this place. Eddie thanks his past self for wanting to keep in shape and rolls up the arms of his unsalvageable coat. He heaves and picks at rocks and debris, the recent memories coming back to him just as the dustier ones had when he’d entered Derry. 

The deadlights, Richie suspended, killing IT, and then this. 

It takes him hours, but when he crawls out into the dark water of the canal, he’s bone weary, unsure. The cool night air whips around him and his skin lights up in gooseflesh, tickling at his stomach through the massive hole in his shirt. Eddie pinches himself to ensure he’s real, that this isn’t some fucked up afterlife dream; he plucks at his wet shirt, blood and dirt commingling. He’s covered from head to toe in filth but he’s alive, and what does that even mean?

After everything he’s seen, after everything he’s been through with his people—

His people.  
  
  
  
_ His _ people.

_ Where the fuck is Richie. Where the fuck is Richie. I am alive and where the fuck is Richie. _

He doesn’t know what day it is, or what time. It doesn’t matter. He could have been down there for months—doesn’t matter, doesn’t—but as he makes his way up to the asphalt, he finds himself on the edge of town and is glad to see that the town is asleep. The early hours of the morning, then. Eddie sets off in the direction of the last place he remembers being—the townhouse—and slips in through the front entrance.

_ Only in Derry _ , Eddie thinks, moving silently,  _ would there be so much unexplained death yet this place still leaves their fucking doors unlocked. _ Eddie glances into the lounge area, noting that the bottle of bourbon he’d taken the other night is still missing. If it hasn’t been replaced, he can’t have been gone that long, and with any luck, his friends might still be around. 

He’s as quiet as he can manage given his very specific circumstances, hauling himself up the staircase toward the rooms. Eddie’s legs wobble and his vision blurs; he has to lean against the wall for the last few steps. He passes the Losers rooms, one by one, not bothering to stop in his slog; he’s afraid that if he does, he won’t get to where he needs to be.

When he reaches his intended destination he takes a deep, deep breath.

He’s reasonably certain that he’s not certain at all about what the fuck has happened since their showdown in the cistern, about time and the passing of it, or the technicalities of resurrection, but he’d bet all of that against knowing exactly what he’s been missing these last twenty-odd years. 

It’s all a bit unhinged, which Eddie figures is pretty par for the course. Even attempting to imagine normalcy is idiotic if not downright insane. He wouldn’t know how to  _ imagine _ a normal life at this point, really. Derry had given him a lot: a tolerance for turning the other cheek, a pretty solid grasp of math and science (for Maine), the love of his life, and a death clown that happened to be the personification of fear. 

Eddie really isn’t sure how to explain anything, but there’s only one thing for him to do at the moment, and so he does it. 

His hand slaps down hard, twice, his palm burning into the wood. It’s too late to be making such noise, but at this point he’s got no fucks left to give. 

For a moment, there’s nothing but stillness and quiet, but then there’s a shuffling behind the door. Eddie backs away just before it’s thrown open with a rough, “Really, I don’t need a pill.”

When Richie’s hand moves from swiping down his face, he’s ashen and disheveled and doesn’t seem to be all there. Eddie can’t breathe, because he’s alive and Richie is alive and he’s  _ here  _ and—

Richie doesn’t double take, but he does stare for a long, long time. A bit like a holding pattern, Eddie can stand it for a bit, just looking at his  _ face _ , and he needs a moment to catch his breath anyway.

He doesn’t know if it’s common to trip vision, but Eddie sees several Richies simultaneously, eight and thirteen and eighteen and now. They’re all the very same human he knew right down to his cells back when he was too young and stupid to know what love was. He’s the same person that exploded Eddie’s heart with a joke about Batman’s codpiece on the twelfth of July, 1988. 

None of that means what it should because he’s standing on the threshold of Richie Tozier’s room having just having come back from the dead.

Eddie takes a breath and plucks at his soiled and shredded shirt, the dried muck making it starchy and scratchy. He can smell and taste the blood on his lips and figures he probably looks like shit since, well, he’s covered in shit.

He’s a bit shocked to find that he’s not freaking out about that, either. 

After a moment Richie’s gazes abandons its top to bottom perusal and snap to meet Eddie’s and he reaches out swiftly to take the doorknob in hand, steadying himself. Eddie is officially sapped of any last bit of strength he had and his ability to remain upright is dwindling rapidly. 

“What the actual fuck, man?” Eddie asks tiredly, and stumbles backwards, falls against the wall behind him, sliding down onto the floor.

Richie remains stock-still, mouth hanging, gaping open. It’s completely silent, save for Eddie’s rough breaths. Richie is so still that Eddie wonders for a brief, insane moment if he’d dreamed this all up, if he’s still in the ether, but then Richie’s hands start to shake at his side and he retches dryly.

“Don’t puke on me,” Eddie manages, with a weak smile.  
  
  
  
“You’re not real,” Richie gasps, backing up a few feet into his room before stumbling back forward again. Eddie realizes that maybe this wasn’t the best way to go about things. Maybe showing up at the forgotten-love-of-your-life’s door after he’s seen you murdered by a demon that can  _ manifest _ fear, wasn’t the best tack to take. 

There’s nothing he can do about it now.

He wants a shower, wants seven gallons of water, wants to reach out and touch Richie so fucking badly, but he can’t do anything aside from sit, exactly where he is, on the floor.  
  
  
  
“Yeah, I am Rich. I…” But he’s out of breath and can’t think of how the hell to explain  _ how _ he’s here, so he gestures weakly at his healed cheek. Richie’s eyes flit there, bugging out a bit when he realizes there’s no knife wound, just a vague, silvery scar. Eddie then lifts his shirt and places his hand over where he knows, where he can feel the clown had run him through. “Something about a turtle? Don’t know how. Just, look.”  
  
  


And suddenly Richie is on the floor, scrambling across on all fours to touch at Eddie’s tender, pink flesh. It looks like skin just after a wound has closed for the first time, and it smarts, but there’s no hole through the middle of him.

Richie tugs the hem of shirt out of his hand and pulls it out, taut, gazes down through the ragged hole and then drops the fabric, fingers moving back to Eddie’s navel. Richie’s fingers feel like a dream. 

“Jesus, jesus, jesus,  _ Eds _ ,” Richie says, putting his hands all over Eddie’s skin.

  
  


It’s not two seconds later before he’s hyperventilating, shimming back on the worn carpet to thunk his head, tipped back against the opposite wall. “Jesus fuck. What the fucking, _ fucking _ fuck?!”

“Breathe,” Eddie implores, though it sounds rough and grainy, and really, like he’s one to talk.

“Fuck you don’t tell me to fucking breathe, oh my _ god _ ,” and he’s heaving in desperate breaths, tears squeezing out the corners of his eyes. “Oh my god, oh my god.” But then he’s crawling back across the carpet and taking Eddie in his arms, gathering him up with frantic, greedy fingers and squeezing him so tightly Eddie cannot physically move. 

“How,” he smears into Eddie’s hair.   
  


“Like I said. Don’t know,” Eddie manages to huff out into Richie’s neck. He settles his lips there and breathes, allows himself to be held, clutched. If he could crawl inside of Richie’s body right now, he would. If he could allow Richie to crawl inside of him and hold him forever, he would. All he wants right now is to lock them both away somewhere safe.  
  


  
Richie is shaking, and Eddie is shaking, and he can’t get enough of Richie’s scent, keeps sucking in giant, heaving gulps of air.

“I saw it, I saw it go through you, I  _ saw _ it,” and Riche starts to rock him, crying into his hair. Eddie can feel the wetness, can feel Richie’s breath ghosting over his scalp. “You gotta tell me this is real, how is this real?”

When he pulls back, he holds Eddie by the shoulders. “You’re real?”

“I’m real,” Eddie says quietly. 

“Prove it,” Richie says, and means it. It makes sense. Richie looks devastated and hopeful, guilty that he has to ask this of him. 

“Okay,” Eddie says, wracks his weary brain for what to say. A thousand different stories from their lives together spring forth, sweet and cloying, and so treasured that Eddie has to take a deep, deep breath to process them.

  
  
Richie gives him a moment, as he settles down on the worn rug next to him. Their bodies are close and Richie is so warm, and jesus, Eddie wants to sleep forever, but.

  
  
“I uh. I… you bought me a Captain America action figure for my ninth birthday and then promptly ripped it’s fucking head off and you cried about it. God, you cried for, like, an hour.”

Richie has the presence of mind to look slightly guilty; he’s haggard but rapt, almost gawking at Eddie, and Eddie thinks for the umpteenth time how he’d ever managed to forget this face. “I had that panic attack after volleyball in gym? In the ninth grade? And after you started carrying around my spare inhaler with you just in case, wrote my name on it and everything, and I said that it was weird, but jesus, that meant everything to me.”

Richie moves, sidles closer still as Eddie continues on. “And, we almost got caught that time in your car at the quarry.” Eddie’s voice dips even lower now, because it’s the only way to talk about this, it’s the only way to speak about something that’s been just remembered but has lived in the cockles of his heart for decades. “The Staties drove up and, uhm… after you made a really, really bad joke about sodomy laws and I, uhm, I cried? Because I thought it would always be like that, like I couldn’t see my way out of Derry.”

When Eddie glances over, Richie’s hanging his head. In the dusty quiet of the hallway, Eddie can hear his gentle sobs.

“And uh, the other night, in your room, I almost… almost told you that, that… that I, uh, don’t want to go back to a life that you’re not a part of, and yeah before you say anything I know that’s fucked up, it’s been like a day. I still have a lot of shit to figure out.” Eddie breathes, really breathes; he’s so tired. So tired of so much shit. “I thought a lot, before when I was trying to figure out how to get the fuck out of the sewers. I thought about dying and, about life, and how I have so many years of memories to go through and… you’re in ‘em. You’re all of them, Rich.”

Richie just keeps his head down, chin to chest; Eddie thinks he might actually be holding his breath. “It’s fucked up, but I can’t ignore that, I don’t want to, man. It’s insane. I’m forty fucking years old and have apparently...” God, his throat is so, so dry, but water is the last thing on his mind.

His heart throbs painfully in his chest and he can’t help himself. Eddie reaches over and tips Richie’s blotchy, tear-streaked face up so that they can see one another. “Yeah, I've been in love with you since I was thirteen. Before then, even. It’s fucking tragic, right? Carrying that fucking torch all this timeand not knowing it.”

Richie blinks.

“But the second I saw you, Rich, it came back and hit me in the fucking face that I’ve been in love with you in my  _ bones,  _ man, for decades.”

Richie just blinks. The breath he lets out is shivery and shaky, and for a moment, he looks as though he’s going to vomit. God, he looks like he’s lived centuries since Eddie last saw him in the cistern. 

“That’s,” Richie’s voice cracks and scratches. “Really gay, dude.”

“Asswipe, I fucking hate you, I came back from the  _ dead  _ for you,” Eddie says.

“I love you,” Richie says immediately, clearly, succinctly, his eyes so wide and surprised by his own admission, but it lands, real, between them, and Eddie is so relieved. 

His head lolls back against the wall and he closes his eyes, stealing a moment for himself so that  _ everything _ can wash over him. “That’s… the best thing I’ve ever heard,” Eddie whispers, and opens his eyes. 

There’s nothing to do but stare in wonder at one another for a long, long, time. Eddie thinks of all of the shit he’s going to have to deal with, and it should make him crazy, should make him want to scream, but he’s never felt more at peace. He’s sitting in a hallway, resurrected, covered in bacteria and filth, but… Richie Tozier loves him. Holy fuck.

It’s Richie who breaks the solemnity of the moment with a stunning suggestion of responsibility.

“I know this is going to sound really sexy and you’re going to want to go to the bone zone,” Richie starts tiredly, “But we should really feed you and get you in bed.”

A startled little huff of a laugh punches out of him, and Eddie immediately feels just how close to passing out he is. “Yeah, I uh, I obviously don’t have a key to my room, gotta go do—”

“I had them move your things into my room when, uh, well, you know. Uhm. I think… I’m going to say something really needy and insane but you should stay with me tonight. Just so…” Richie trails off but Eddie knows exactly what he’s getting at.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that this, all of it, is some sort of fucked-up Derry fever dream. And if Eddie is being truthful with himself, he desperately needs to be near Richie, needs to touch him and see him and feel him breathe. Because he  _ exists _ . “Yeah, yeah, I…”

“And I’ve always fantasized about getting you naked in the shower… I think,” Richie jests weakly, and struggles to his feet.

“Bet you have, idiot.” And it can’t be true, for all of the forgetting, but he wishes it was. 

  
  
Eddie is tugged gently to standing and allows Richie to sling his arm around his waist; he feels full-up when Richie twists to drop a kiss into his soiled and matted hair. It’s ridiculous, it’s incongruous with what should be happening in the moment, but Eddie lets it happen, lets Richie guide him so very gently into the room. 

There are practicalities to attend to, and at the moment, the only one Eddie can voice is, “How uh, how long was I—”

“Two days,” Richie murmurs, and flicks on the bedside lamp. “We, uh, I couldn’t… I couldn’t leave, man. We couldn’t— Everyone’s still…” Trailing off, Richie crosses the room and walks Eddie to the bed, helping him to sit down. Shaky hands peel him out of his jacket and they pry gently at the hem of his shirt. 

Eddie allows himself to be worked out of his clothing. When he stands at Richie’s urging, Richie doesn’t hesitate in divesting him of his pants and underwear; he wraps him in a towel and leads him to the small bathroom. Eddie slumps back on the toilet while Richie warms the water for him. 

“Can you stand?” Richie asks, and when Eddie goes to do so, he sways viciously on his feet.

“Okay, okay,” Richie catches him. “Uhm, do you…”

“You’re gonna need to help me,” he manages in response, bracketing his body against the wall for a moment before plonking back down onto the toilet seat. 

Richie stares for a moment, the bathroom beginning to steam. “Okay, yeah, I can do that,” he says and begins working himself out of his clothes right then and there. Eddie watches, vaguely interested; he’s seen this skin before, he’s seen this body, he’s held it beneath his own quivering hands. And decades later, it still thrills him that Richie is willing to share such intimacy with him so easily. 

Richie drops his clothing on the floor and immediately reaches for Eddie’s hand. “C’mere.”

Together, they ensure they get into the shower without toppling over, but Eddie finds that he can’t manage to lift his arms high enough to wash himself. Richie takes it upon himself to lather up Eddie’s hair, fingers lingering, pressing into his scalp. Eddie drifts, eyes flickering open and closed, and watches the filth sluice down the drain. Richie’s hands move over his body, warm washcloth rubbing with care against his skin. He’s most careful around Eddie’s torso; the skin stings and Eddie hisses when the washcloth touches the skin there. “Sorry, sorry, babe,” and Eddie feels Richie’s lips press briefly against the base of his neck. 

It’s a process, and after having conditioner worked through his hair, Eddie’s on the verge of passing out. “Rich, fading fast, here.”

Richie says nothing but shuts off the spray and steps out first, grabbing a towel and wrapping Eddie in it before he bothers to dry off himself. He sits him back on the toilet while he hastily towels himself off and then disappears; he’s back a moment later, clad in pajama pants and a threadbare shirt. 

Together, they manage to dress Eddie in a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt; Richie pulls thick, wool socks onto his feet. “You’re in shock,” Richie explains, and it’s only then that Eddie realizes his teeth are chattering.

Eddie wants to thank him, wants to let him how appreciative his is, how cared for he feels, how fucking lucky they both are to be alive, and holy shit how much Eddie loves him, but he only manages a grunt. They shuffle together to the bed. Richie props him up to sit on the right side against the pillows so that he can clean his wounds. 

It’s lucky that Eddie had brought a small, first-aid kit with him, and Richie utilizes it the best he can to disinfect and bandage up the cuts and scrapes. Eddie is both surprised and not that Richie is so attentive and careful with him, focusing his ever-wavering attention for a long, long while as he patches Eddie up. 

Richie gives him a glass of water, and then another, and then another, and when Eddie waves off a fourth he’s handed a granola bar. He can only stomach a few bites, and then Richie helps him settle under the covers.

They face one another, Eddie’s eye drifting swiftly closed after Richie shuts off the light. 

Sleep tugs at him and he goes willingly. He’s nearly tipped fully into slumber when Richie’s quiet voice breaks the silence. “Eds, I don’t mean to be a little bitch, but can you please be here when I wake up in the morning?”

  
  
Eddie smiles into the pillow. “No place I’d rather be."

  
  


\---

Eddie wakes up the next evening around six o’clock to an empty room. He wills himself not to panic just before it hits him how his body feels like it’s been put through a meat grinder. “Holy fuck,” he grits out and turns on his other side, but it's just as painful. As he waits for the wave of agony to subside, he realizes there’s a piece of paper folded on the bedside table. 

He has to torque his body very carefully to snatch it up. Beneath it lay two pills. “These are codeine! Eat the granola bar! Drink the water! Take the codeine! Filling in the guys. Will be back to check on you.” Body stiff, he climbs from bed and very carefully relieves himself and brushes his teeth before doing as instructed. Eddie conks back out when the codeine takes over.   
  


  
When he comes to again, it’s a little after nine and Richie is sitting in the chair next to the bed, laptop open on his knees. 

“Hey,” he drawls out when Eddie shifts, groans into full wakefulness. “How are you? Never mind. Stupid question, you’re probably feeling like shit.”

“Feels like I went round for round with Pacquiao,” Eddie coughs and gingerly maneuvers so he’s upright in the bed, wincing. 

Richie delights him with a half-smile, “Sorry bud, no Pacquiao, but you did face down a demon clown from hell. Need more pills?”

Eddie agrees to one to take the edge off and also accepts the take out container of miso soup that Richie hands him. 

“Start slow,” Richie advises and sits next to him on the bed while he works through it.

“So. The guys know I’m, uh, not dead?” he eventually asks, slowly peeling off his sweatshirt.

Richie’s eyes drift to his exposed torso, his fingers gently rubbing over the rapidly-healing skin. It’s not pink anymore, not really, but Eddie can still feel the phantom pain there. He imagines it’ll be awhile before that ebbs. 

Richie cups a hand around the back of Eddie’s neck. “Despite those idiots having been through a fucking supernatural saga, me convincing them that you’re alive took way fucking longer than I expected. Had to give them a little peep show of you snoozin’ away.” Eddie laughs, tiredly. “Like, Jesus can do it, but you can’t? Okay.”

He smiles, but he feels unbelievably lost. Sadness claws at his insides; being so close to Richie like this while in such an ambiguous situation. He’s married and he doesn’t want to be; he wants to be on the other side of the country with a man he loves but doesn’t know how to be with. “God, what… what the fuck am I supposed to do now?” he asks Richie, no one, himself.

It’s a fucking understatement to acknowledge that his life, their lives, had changed irreversibly. Eddie was sure he hadn’t even contemplated half of the world-altering realities that he now had to try and face. He wasn’t sure how to do that at all, didn’t have a single fucking clue. 

“What do you want to do?” Richie asks, very slowly.

Placing the soup down on the bedside table, he considers that. He knows, somewhere deep in his marrow, what he wants to do, but putting voice to intent seems terrifying and much bigger than he can handle. He hadn’t really thought about the reality of this, of them living with the knowledge of their mutual yearning, so he skirts. “Go back and kick the shit out of Pennywise the first time around so we didn’t lose all this time. Get a really fucking good therapist that dives too deep into why I’m so massively fucked up.” 

He sighs, a heavy thing, because that’s what he should want. What he actually wants is something completely ridiculous. “Realistically? Rich, I... “ He won’t make eye contact.

“What do you  _ want _ , Eds?”

Still, Eddie remains silent, running his thumbnail along the nailbeds of his opposite hand. This isn’t just something he can have, it’s not something he can simply state and then move on as though he hasn’t had his entire fucking life turned upside down, half by the man sitting in the chair next to him. 

Fucking... Richie Tozier. 

“Hey,” Richie says, his hand coming to rest atop Eddie’s knee; it’s intimate and sweet and dear god Eddie feels like he’s going to cry, just lose his shit entirely. “You’re brave, remember? It’s me. What do you want?”

Squeezing his eyes closed, he slaps a clammy palm atop Richie’s.  _ It’s just like a band aid _ , he tells himself; e can just say it and it’ll be out there and then the ball will be in Richie’s court and he won’t have to feel so fucking afraid any more. 

“I hear Los Angeles is nice. Really… sunny.”

There’s silence and stillness in the room and Eddie wishes that he can snatch it back, shove it down his throat and pretend he’s never wanted Richie, not at all, certainly not now. How is this more frightening than the cistern? 

What the hell is he doing?

_ What the hell is he doing? _

The thought of completely redirecting his life at forty isn’t that bad compared to laying it all on the line for this person who used to be his best friend, who used to be his whole world. Eddie is stunned at how desperately bad he wants  _ what he wants, _ to be a reality. 

There’s another beat and then Richie’s hand flips, and he twines their fingers together. He holds Eddie’s hand so, so tightly. “Yeah, but you know, I hear that SPF causes cancer?”

It takes a moment for Eddie to synthesize what Richie’s said, and he can hear blood pounding in his ears, feels hot and off-kilter and  _ boundless _ .

“Fuck you, man,” Eddie laughs, relief flooding warm through his veins, and he feels so wonderfully and wholly like he’s twelve again. “That’s what I want. If—”

“Come on, Kaspbrak. Yes,” Richie says quickly, surely, squeezing his hand.

“Yeah?”

“ _ Hell _ yes, Eds, I—”

But Eddie has twisted his body, pain be damned, to press his mouth against Richie’s. It’s a quiet little kiss, a revelation, and Richie sips in a quick breath before deepening it. Nothing feels more natural than Richie’s hand against his cheek, nothing feels more right than Richie’s whispered, relieved “yes” into Eddie’s mouth. 

\---

  
  
It’s a sunny, humid day when Richie asks him to go for a drive. They’ve been holed up in the townhouse so long while Eddie gets back into his body—Richie bankrolling it after Myra cancels their joint cards—and Eddie thinks it’s time that they venture back out into the real world. 

They get in the car and just drive, enjoying the languid end of August sunlight, windows down. They drift over to the coast and then meander down old highway 1 until they hit New Hampshire. It’s dusk when they turn around, driving back to Derry. “For the  _ last  _ goddamned time,” Richie whoops over Depeche Mode. 

Eddie drums his fingers against the roof of the car in agreement. 

They drive past the turn off for the Barrens, neither one of them says a thing, but they both glance down at the embankment with apprehension. Eddie wonders if it’ll always be like this, but then, he really doesn’t plan on coming back to Maine for a long-ass time. When he puts his eyes back on the road, he notices Richie slowing the car, taking a right and then, they’re pulling over the creaking wood of the Kissing Bridge. 

“God, this fuckin’ place. How many people actually made out here? Why didn’t they call it the carving bridge? Not romantic I guess, but what the fuck ever. ” Eddie says.

“Oh, I took all the babes here back in the day,” Richie says and Eddie reaches over to thwack him against the chest. 

Richie brings the car to a stop just on the other side. Eddie says nothing but raises a questioning brow at him, apprehensive. He doesn’t have great memories here; the Bowers gang had claimed it as territory, so the entire notion of the bridge strikes a low thrum of fear in him.

For the umpteenth time, Eddie reminds himself that he needs to find a therapist in Los Angeles. 

“Humor me,” Richie says eventually, cutting the engine and climbing out of the car.

With an eye roll, Eddie unbuckles his seatbelt and opens the passenger door. 

Crickets take up a cacophony around them, mosquitos buzzing annoyingly in their ears, enjoying the last of the summer weather. Maine in summer sounds a particular way, and Eddie wonders if now he can remember this place will he miss it at all?

Richie is unusually quiet and composed as he leads them over to the railing where hundreds of Derry’s youth have carved their indelible love into the wood. Some are dated and some aren’t. Distantly, he wonders how many of these couples, if any, are still together. It’s a saccharine thought, but he entertains it idly while he looks his fill. 

Eddie’s eyes trail over the etchings, the rough edges and blocky signatures. 

And then he spots it, the letters just deep enough to make out. They’ve been weathered and bleached, but Eddie can see them, clear as day. “Rich…”

“September 12th, 1990. I skipped algebra because I didn’t want anyone to see, but…” Richie smiles sadly down at the carving. “I was so scared, but I needed to do something. It felt so big inside me. I thought that if I left it here, I could… I don’t know, it wouldn’t hurt so much. I wouldn’t have so much to hide from.”

Eddie slides his arm around Richie’s waist and brings them together. It’s sweet in a way that hurts. Eddie’s not sure he’ll ever get over being resentful for all of this time lost, but he can’t let it overtake him, not now, not when they can be here, as themselves, together. 

His eyes are tugged to the left, to something that he left here, like a promise.

“That, uh.” Eddie points to a roughly scratched ‘R’ enclosed in an even sloppier heart. “You had better skills than I did, but that was… god, seventh grade? After a sleepover at Stan’s, and you’d crawled into my bag and slept next to me, and I woke up early and felt… well. I wanted it here, forever. I wanted this town to know that it couldn’t break us.”

“There’s no ‘E’, you dweeb.”

Eddie smiles sadly. “It was too scary. I thought someone would see those letters together and they’d… they’d know. I never thought, I mean, every time I saw that R and E, I wanted to believe it was you, but… jesus, I was terrified.”

They’re contemplative, quiet and clinging, as the stars begin to peek out. 

“I love you,” Eddie says once, and then says it again, louder.

Richie disentangles himself and wraps Eddie up in a proper hug, dropping kisses in his hair. “I’ve never  _ not  _ loved you, Eds.”

He feels it all, in that moment: how lucky he is, how really, truly lucky, one-in-a-million this chance is. That knowledge lights him up, electricity buzzing beneath his skin. He’s  _ happy,  _ and they’re together _ .  _ And fuck everything else, for the time being.

  
  
He’s going to take Richie’s advice and let it all hang for a while and just be grateful, not question it, figure out how to live. It’s going to be wild, looking forward to getting up in the morning.

It’s going to be wild, being in love with someone who loves him just as fiercely. 

Eddie pulls away, glances up to find Richie gazing down at him, tears brimming along his lower lashes and he feels boundless and limitless and more whole than he’s ever felt in his life. It’s so right that he feels dizzy with it.

“It’s the truest thing I’ve ever known,” Riche says, seriously, and Eddie can’t take it, can’t help it. 

  
  
He leans in and places a lingering kiss against the pulse in Richie’s neck. “That’s really fucking gay, man,” he croaks as his own tears brim over.

Richie laughs, loud and manic, into the night. 

  
  
“Very, very gay,” he agrees.    
  


  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks to [rc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan/pseuds/RC_McLachlan) and [stitchy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchy) for their services. (Darling Elizabeth—my Yankee fan fan friend who lives in NYC and is from the Great Nutmeg State—thank you for the title.)
> 
> follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/scullyseviltwin) and [tumblr](https://scullyseviltwin.tumblr.com/)


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